Thesis

Social media, as it exists today, is an industry of incredible value worth trillions of USD, yet one afflicted by inequality in wealth distribution. While the popularity of social media platforms rests on the quality of user-generated media, they have allowed content creation to become an area rife with inequality. By having absolute say over what is monetized and what is made most prominent, platforms are able to censor at will and become the arbiters of what is deemed "good media." Creators, on the other hand, are forced to tailor their output to the tastes of the platform, while their audiences are denied exposure to novelty that might inform their future choices.

Despite this unfortunate state of affairs, a new breed of social media is emerging out of decentralized, blockchain technology. Cryptocurrency-based platforms that empower the communities that use them represent a new breed of social media that has the potential to solve many of the industry's underlying problems. This new Social Media is currently being built on Ethereum.

Ethereum is the perfect protocol for creating a new breed of social media because it is both a protocol and a platform. Whereas in the past it has been hampered by transaction costs, Layer 2 solutions have risen to solve this problem. And while fungibility previously rendered accounts largely non-descript, the explosion in popularity of NFTs have added "personality" and "influence" where once there was none. At its core, Ethereum's smart contract technology now fully allows for the creation of programs and databases on top of it capable of building a "social layer" on Web 3 technology, allowing for behavior and information to be indexed yet in a decentralized manner that removes the control of any single authority. Instead of a Big Tech monolith controlling aggregated data like we have become familiar with through the actions of the likes of Facebook, Ethereum allows open communities to make use of its resources in the manner that serves specifically their interests.

The mainstream acceptance of Ethereum, NFTs and cryptocurrency more broadly has only just begun. Several trends are now converging that together will enable the development of the creator economy into an empowered and egalitarian phenomenon.

The first of these trends is DAOs (coordination tools) and the second is Social Tokens (monetization tools for creators of the creator economy). Together, these will allow power to be distributed among community members in recognition of their ongoing contributions and equity earned through work. For the Own.fund, itself built upon the DAO-Social Token model, this will mean that the applications that assist them in discovering and investing in component parts of the creator economy are soon to become incredibly powerful and valuable tools.